¹On my reading of the case, the secret service also suspected the firm of promoting computer crime, on roughly the same basis on which they might have suspected Agatha Christie of promoting murder. That particular lunacy was not, however, offered as a justification of the raid--nor did it have to be.

²Three years later, the employee in question has not yet been charged with anything.

³An alternative response, of course, is that there should be no government agents enforcing crime. One attractive feature of a system of private law enforcement is that the enforcers are private citizens, subject to the same legal restrictions as everyone else. For a discussion of this point, see my The Machinery of Freedom chapter ___. For the purposes of this essay, however, I assume that we retain the present legal framework, complete with government enforcement and the distinction between criminal and civil law.

⁴In practice, this means charging the taxpayers, since taxpayers will have to either indemnify policemen against such risks or raise police salaries enough to make potential policemen willing to bear the risk themselves.

⁵Or some equivalent tort in the case of costs imposed on a firm.

⁶If there are other doubtful elements--if, for example, there is some question as to whether a firm actually suffered damages--he must show that the joint probability of all the elements being met is more than fifty percent, which may require a greater than 50% probability of innocence.